Stella Atlantis

Chapter 5-1

Scalp music. Lorn. Burnt jazz on my pate. I am Medusa of the atomic buboes. My photographs emerge from my bald scalp like dream worms of the war mess. My own face is the green and smothering mask I wear to survive. I starved when my daughter died; the ladies admired my new svelte body. Grief and E. coli slimmed me. Women, we walk with masks. Our masks are the siren calls to our own selves to throw off our masks. My art is my obstacle to my intention to make it. These green and smothering things, this ether we put upon ourselves. These snakes, these masks, these avatars of the lorn.

Vivienne Pink walked the night watch alley north. She held her camera at her hip in the amber hours, passing a back garage workshop where a group of guys were sending off sparks, dressed like a hazmat posse in a foundry. Her father, Izzy Pink, Mister Mayor, had died in this alley, taken a heart attack on a night walk. Every time she set out on an assignment, she came to the alley, to say goodbye to her dad.

The taxi rolled up to the house. Out through Metro in the dusk diorama, travelling west through distress and needles and shop glory, the eateries in the light rain lit from inside, and that November there was a heat wave. A guy at Dovercourt and Bloor was beating a red Canada Post box with a baseball bat, warbling, “f**k the hokey-pokey and you f**k the hokey-pokey.” Democratic paradise was overheating, flooding with too much money, yet in the wide low streetscape of Toronto, leaving again to chase down a rumour of terror chatter in Amsterdam, Vivi Pink snapped her hometown through the rainy taxi window, everywhere drive time so pretty. She was bald from the atomic bomb test in Death Valley in 2006. The rain got heavy, the windshield wipers moved back and forth, the taxi moved north in the ravine-laden city, driving on old geology where canoes once paddled the swerve onto the 401, busiest highway in North America, the four-oh-one where polite Canadians took risks, jerks choking or mis-steering or j*********f or just in a spin on a wet patch right before the airport so handy to the excellent trauma ward at Sunnybrook Hospital but not today. Terminal 3, KLM. Flight 062, YYZ to AMS. Departure 16:30, arrival in Amsterdam 7:20 a.m. A Boeing 747-400. On the terminal screens, oversaturated images of Donald John Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton, with one day left in their race to the White House.

Vivienne Pink paid the taximan, unzipped her backpack, reached in, checked that she had her good luck amulet with her before she entered the terminal. Yes. Okay. It was there. She stroked it: a slim hardcover book of poetry, Poeta en Nueva York. Poet in New York, by Federico García Lorca. She took it everywhere, its fuchsia cover and green ribbon bookmark steadying her. When Lorca returned from New York to his homeland Spain, on a road near his home in Granada, the Fascist military shot him in the back. He was thirty-six years old when the soldiers in his own country assassinated the poet Lorca.

Through Terminal 3, where the soon to be departed lined up, in the eternal slow shuffle with their goods, looking down as if in panicked prayer at the lit devices in the palms of their hands, mumbling, davening in call-and-response to the latest news before the airliner took them to the clouds, the tiny screens on the seatbacks where the map of their voyage would show them as a miniscule plane flying over the continents, the oceans, the great rivers. Vivi Pink had intel that there might be a terror attack in Amsterdam. She was flying there to bear witness in photographs.

Over the St. Lawrence, the big river opened its mouth into the Atlantic Ocean. Vivi had dozed at takeoff, her Lorca in her lap. She was in that Economy Comfort section, forward in the plane. In seat 15E, as always. A two-seater, empty aisle seat on her left.

She opened her eyes.

Across the aisle, a tall guy in seat 15C. He had his legs in the aisle, his right hand on his right knee. Her fingers went to her red silk shirt left breast pocket where she kept a credit-card-size spy camera. She pressed her pocket; the miniature lens was aligned with her open buttonhole. The shot she wanted was of the man’s long fingers resting on his indigo jeans. How the hand tensed.

She had fogged her way through the terminal. It hit her now that she’d seen him in the KLM lineup, in front of her. Of course. She’d checked him out, from the shoes up. Dark shoes, laces, good leather, cordovan maybe. A beaten-up leather jacket in chocolate, bleached folds of wear. He carried a black bag, a cross between a medical bag and a briefcase. He had turned around – it came back to her airborne brain – briefly, but long enough for her to see how overtly he was not looking at her as he scanned the line.

He wasn’t on a phone. He’d unzipped his bag, fished inside, nodded to himself, zipped it back up. Hanging below his leather jacket was a rust sweater. The dark jeans. He could be an architect or a chef or a biophysicist, boarding in Toronto, dreading the legroom designed for elves. Long fingers, staying tense near his knee. Vivi snapped a second spy shot.

They flew in the deep dark toward morning.

Mister Legs was reading a book, a hardcover. Vivi the snoop always wanted to know what someone was reading, but she couldn’t see the cover. She dozed off again, woke somewhere over Greenland according to the little screen.

In the nowhere place in the nowhere time of a plane at night flying over the ocean, Vivi took Lorca to the loo. Occupied. A loo door opened. She stepped aside. A hulk in a baggy blue suit lurched onto her t**s, meaty paws up in muscle memory, apparently, of maulings gone by. “Mile-high club, you and me, what say?”

She aimed the Lorca at his balls. Direct hit. As he grabbed his lower nethers, she snapped a pic of him with her spy camera. He looked bothered and bewildered, as if a pumpkin he was going to hump had attacked him with poetry. Poor sod, Vivi thought, with that chronic eye disease called misogyny. Red tie flapping between his legs, he limped out of the vestibule.

She returned to her seat. The green letters on the fuchsia cover transmitted a kind of melismatic verde. The plane was going through turbulence. She read the poem called “Christmas on the Hudson,” about Lorca’s visit to a Jewish cemetery; she read the one about the king of Harlem. Small sketches Lorca made of New York, of himself. How precious the doodles become.

The barometric pressure changed, she felt it in her ears filling and emptying, popping, filling again, as the plane began its descent. The ear pain is so much worse on the landing, though the landing is the best part, it is all ahead and nobody knows the story to come.

“Verde que te quiero verde,” Lorca once wrote. Green how I love you green. Green Amsterdam water rose up to meet the plane.

The low water was rising to the sky and the plane’s belly.

She held on to the Lorca, stroked the green endpapers. She loved the care put into the physical book, attention had been paid. The signatures, those groupings of pages all sewn together up the spine of the book, nestled together in subtle curves. And how sweet was that green ribbon sewn right in, to use as a bookmark. Seda verde, green silk. The sturdy delicacy was erotic. Attention is erotic. Versos verdes.

A pixel is a pixel is a pixel, but a beautiful book is a s*x object forever.

The plane bumped down.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have landed in Amsterdam. Local time is 7:23 a.m. The outside temperature is twelve degrees Celsius.”

Amsterdam, known as Mokum. Once upon a time, when Amsterdam was a city of Jews, Yiddish infiltrated the everyday language of Amsterdammers. The Yiddish word mokum, meaning place, was the local slang name for Amsterdam itself: Mokum, or Mokum Aleph. The Place. The First City. And when the Nazis killed thirty thousand of the forty thousand Jews of Amsterdam, Yiddish remained woven throughout the civic life, language being the great resistance, always. She and Johnny used to like to go to the nachtcafé, the night café in Amsterdam called Mazzeltof.

The silver wings set down in the sinking city wet with Mokum Green.

The green was so bright in the city of Amsterdam, it hurt the grass to grow. The green was so potent, it made poets begin. The green was so groen, the new shoots could feel the power of their own chlorophyll.

Mister Long Legs sat with his hands in his lap. His eyebrows were interrogating his forehead, scrunched up lines below his close-cropped dark hair, the eyebrows making some kind of a math equation with the sides of his lips, which were twitching in a nuanced way. She was feeling giddy dread; she pressed the wafer-thin camera in her shirt pocket. His legs, his cheek with a not pretty scar, snap, snap, and for good luck, his right hand, still tensed on his thigh.

Vivienne stayed in her seat while the trudge up the aisle to exit began.

Mister Legs was content to sit, wait.

When the aisle was clear, he got up. His long arm took her backpack down for her. “Thanks,” she said, making eye contact, upward.

“I like to surf at Las Canteras,” he said. He reached up on his side and took down his black leather bag. Genuine leather, she noticed, worn, experienced. His voice sounded like one of those “maybe” voices. Maybe Dutch. Good English.

“It’s great in winter,” she said.

“The wind is pretty fantastic,” he said. Maybe Belgian. “The left break.” Maybe Dutch, maybe Israeli. Places where you accepted without thinking that everybody spoke excellent English. Vivi Pink, photographer of war and its many parentheses of peace, knew that the real picture of somebody is their voice. She had trained herself to listen to vocal intonation so that she could replicate it in a visual tone. His tone was in the neighbourhood of “I’d like you to enjoy this moment, even if it’s passing.”

The parade down the aisle. The world is one long lineup around the belt of the planet. Vivienne was in no hurry to say goodbye to the two-minute acquaintance with the tall guy. “The trade winds,” she said. “I don’t know if they are trade winds, but it can get crazy in January. I was there in a hurricane once. On the Big Canary.”

“Gran Canaria,” he said, his eyes crinkling. That too. The charisma. You can’t buy it, rent it, imitate it. “Your picture of the green light on the water, that one guy who was on his board, that was pretty incredible. How did you get that shot, the wall of water?”

“That was the January, the hurricane,” she said. Whoa. Believe it, he had seen her book of the Canary Island surfers, he had focused on one of her classic Atlantic surf photos. Charisma is the gift, charm is the way a man works what he is given.

He said, “Also, Mundaka is pretty spectacular.”

They started inching down the aisle. Or, okay, maybe a Swede, she thought. He kept his voice low, friendly. She could do that, too. “Mundaka?” she said. “Also, in January.”